A welcome decision to hear key cases

Petitions on electoral bonds, Article 370 have been pending for long

It is good news that the Supreme Court is set to hear petitions relating to some extremely important issues that have been pending before it for a long time. The Chief Justice of India (CJI) N V Ramana has indicated that the court would take up for consideration some petitions challenging the abrogation of Article 370 and the J&K Reorganisation Act, 2019, passed by parliament. These had removed the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and split the state into two Union Territories. The court will also soon hear petitions challenging the electoral bonds scheme, though no date has been set for the hearing. The court has started hearing petitions on the constitutionality of the sedition law, which is also an important issue. All these petitions have been pending for a long time in the court. The electoral bonds cases have been pending for four years and the petitions over Article 370 are before the court since late 2019.

While the court’s decision to take up these cases is welcome, the issues raised by the delay are still relevant and important. Parliamentary and executive actions in the cases relating to Article 370 and the electoral bonds have created entirely new situations and realities which may be difficult to be addressed by the court’s decisions. If the court finds the scrapping of Article 370 unconstitutional, can the status quo ante be restored? In the case of electoral bonds, thousands of crores of rupees from anonymous sources have gone into party coffers under this scheme in the past four years. Most of this has gone to the ruling BJP. The scheme is considered to be opaque, unfair and biased in favour of the ruling party. What happens to all the money that have gone to the parties if the court strikes down the scheme as bad in law?

The listing of the cases and the hearings do not ensure that an early decision will be made on them. Since important issues of the law and the Constitution, parliament’s powers and the correctness of executive action are involved and they have a bearing on the country’s democratic system and practices, the hearings are bound to take a long time. The CJI, who decided to take up the cases, is also set to retire soon. Hopefully the court will take all this into consideration when it sits on cases of serious import such as these. Even now it is not known when the court will hear petitions against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019, which raises important issues relating to citizenship, minority rights and equal protection for all before the law. Justice sometimes becomes irrelevant if it is delayed, and that may be the situation with some cases pending before the court now.